Nintex Workflow Web Request failing with '&amp;' characters in xml

I have this WebRequest xml. Everything is correct, and it works for our company 99% of the time. I only just discovered this today. When we run UpdateListItems the workflow erros with a soap exception. Tracking what causes it the 1 percent of the time it was the character '&'.

1. We cannot prevent all our users from inputting an & in EVERY text field.

2. We cannot put regex expressions before EVERY UpdateListItems WebRequest for every variable,(replacing '&' with 'And') we think that is too much overhead, and some of these updatelistitems use 10-15 Fields to update.

3. Additionally, overhead for converting the '&' to the html entity is also too much overhead

4. We will not use the Nintex OOB 'WebService', it has too many of it's own problems.

1. Are their other processes that would work? We would prefer something soap related. The nintex oob have come with migration issues, don't work across farms / site collections(maybe)/ and don't meet various standards for easy implementations.

2. Is there a way we can make nintex send the literal values? or prevent either API's from evaluating the '&'?